Secrets of the Old South : Professor Journeys to Mississippi to Illuminate the Lives of Freed Slaves During the Civil War Era

As he hunted through old courthouse papers in Natchez, Miss., on a warm evening three summers ago, searching for clues to the lives of emancipated slaves, Cal State Northridge professor Ronald Davis discovered one of history’s little gems.

There, carefully tucked in an envelope, was the 1845 marriage license of Jefferson Davis, later president of the Confederate States of America, and Varina Howell, a witty Mississippian whose family owned an estate near Natchez called The Briars.

“Someone had recognized the value of that document . . . and had hidden it away,” said Davis, a specialist in Southern economic history. “It’s probably worth $25,000 to a collector. It was very historically exciting.”

Since 1991, Davis and a band of CSUN graduate students have trekked annually to the history-rich Mississippi River town to mine the local courthouse for records of long-ago marriages, murders and land deals the way archeologists dig for the remains of ancient cities.

Their research has led to fresh insights into the lives and culture of free blacks before and after the Civil War in the Natchez area, where slave-nurtured cotton produced one of the biggest concentrations of wealth in the antebellum South.

The trips also prompted a remarkable collaboration among Davis, his students and history buffs in Mississippi that resulted in exhibitions in Los Angeles of historical Mississippi photographs and creation of a biennial historians’ conference on Natchez.

With help from his students, Davis in 1993 wrote a book, “The Black Experience in Natchez, 1720-1880,” that the U.S. Interior Department used to develop a national park in the Old Natchez Historic District.

A number of Davis’ students are high school history teachers, and they have incorporated their Natchez studies into their own curricula. Two students even got married and, as Davis puts it, “several other romances are underway.”

But the expeditions are not all academic adventure and bonding. Historic sleuthing can have its hazards, as some of Davis’ students found out when thick dust from old records sent them to the hospital with respiratory problems.

“When they open these things, little things come out. Some of them haven’t been opened in 150 years,” he said, adding that students now wear surgical masks while working with the papers.

Davis’ fascination with Natchez began in 1968 when, as a young doctoral student seeking dissertation material, he arrived there aboard a Greyhound bus.

He soon learned that since the city had been occupied by Union troops early in the Civil War, its courthouse--and tens of thousands of records within--escaped the heavy damage that ruined similar records elsewhere in the South.

*

As a prewar cotton capital, the Natchez area was an ideal laboratory for Davis’ field of interest, the economic impact of the shift from slave-based agriculture to sharecropping, which many emancipated slaves took up after the war.

Davis kept returning to Natchez over the next 15 years, doing research and gradually becoming addicted to the memory-soaked town that, more than a century later, so strongly evoked the Old South.

“Part of it was the sleepy pace and all that antebellum architecture; part of it, too, was the kudzu that draped the environs,” he has written. “But most addictive was something about the town that bespoke of memories and myths: it was a little like being in Brigadoon, a mythical town that might disappear at any moment.”

After the Interior Department commissioned his book in 1991, Davis began taking students to Natchez each summer to do research.

On one trip, Davis realized that legal papers he had worked with a decade before were missing. He inquired about the papers at the courthouse and was directed to several basement rooms.

Inside, he and his students made a startling find: nearly 90,000 court cases--many untouched for generations--dating back to the late 18th century.

“There was tremendous information on the role of women, slaves, crime, violence and order in the Old South contained in those documents,” he said.

Davis assigned his students the enormous task of cleaning, cataloging and placing each document in acid-free folders. Four summers later, he said, they are up to cases from 1810.

Their labors were aided by the Historic Natchez Foundation, a group of local history buffs who arranged to move the documents from the musty depths of the courthouse to an old high school the foundation owns.

Mimi Miller, the foundation’s director of preservation, said the work of Davis and his students is important in helping Natchez understand its colorful and dark past.

The newly unearthed documents “draw scholars from all over the country,” she said. “It’s been a wonderful thing for our community in terms of historic preservation.”

Davis said the records indicate that there was a special relationship between whites and the large colony of freed slaves in Natchez, and because of it, slaves were treated less cruelly there than in other parts of the South.

“In the community of Natchez, though it was in the South and at the heart of slavery, there was a level of paternalism that tended to govern relations between the races, and that softened . . . racial conflict that could have easily broken out in revolution and bloodshed,” he said.

Many whites viewed freed blacks more as human beings than as chattel, and interracial love affairs were common, he said. Thus, freed blacks were allowed to prosper before the war in a way that gave a leg up to slaves liberated later, said Davis.

As a result, blacks were able to gain political and economic control of the region during Reconstruction, Davis said. Indeed, the first black seated in the U.S. Senate, Hiram Revels, was a Natchez minister.

*

The work of Davis and his students has made them minor celebrities in Natchez, where an outpouring of Southern hospitality has left them a bit overwhelmed.

A court clerk gave them a key to the courthouse, so they could pore over records at all hours of the night. They are invited to dinner at elegant old plantation homes. When they partied at a dockside tavern whose owners wanted to turn in early, they were told to close up and “leave whatever you owe on the bar.”

“I’m from New York,” said student Eric Schoenbaum, a Fairfax High School teacher. “He warned us to be very, very polite. It was a different world. . . . These people are very friendly. So friendly that if they were in New York, I’d think they were phony.”

Another dividend was meeting a septuagenarian doctor, Thomas Gandy, who had purchased and painstakingly restored thousands of old glass-plate photographic negatives depicting steamboats, slaves and other scenes of 19th-century Mississippi.

Gandy took a liking to Davis and his students--including one he happily dubbed “the whorehouse lady” after learning of her academic interest in Natchez prostitutes--and brought them to his antebellum home, Myrtle Banks, for informal lectures on his photos.

That led to the idea of exhibiting his huge collection in Los Angeles. And late last year, Gandy’s prints drew crowds at CSUN’s Art Galleries, the California Afro-American Museum and the University of Judaism.

For Davis’ students, the Natchez expeditions have brought to wondrous life a place they otherwise would have known only through books, documents and photos.

“Under him, I made the transfer from a person who is interested in history to a historian,” said John Bartke, who often draws upon his Natchez knowledge when teaching American history at Littlerock High School in the Antelope Valley.

*

Miller, of the Natchez foundation, said even apprehensive African American students from CSUN have taken to the city as a result of their visits. She cited the experience of one black student, an ex-Los Angeles police officer, who found himself being trailed one night by a “big pickup truck with gun racks.’

“I’m dead,” the man said to himself. But instead of mayhem, the truck driver was intent only on getting directions to a local nightclub, Miller said.

“We get tickled . . . because CSUN thinks it’s a real thrill that we let them come down here,” she said. “But we find it hard to believe the California students want to come to Natchez when it’s 100 degrees and work with our dirty court records.”